Wine 1.4 stable release in extras-testing for N900

I've been keeping wine updated in extras-devel for some time now, just for fun. Anyway, stable version of wine, 1.4, was released a couple of weeks ago and I've now promoted it to testing just in case anyone is interested to play with it. All the apps that come with wine works (winemine, notepad, etc) so have fun with that :)

Note: Runs ARM binaries only,  remember that!

New camera-ui in CSSU

There is a new, open, camera-ui in the latest CSSU. It looks like to the but has some impressive new feature also. Distance to focus point, configurable startup/shutdown of camera app, more geotagging options (gps/location), image effcets, triggering from touch screen, timer and quick access to White balance and ISO sensitivty settings.

Screenshots below:

New camera-ui main interface, notice the new focus distance information, timer, trigger, image effects and the two 'A's

New startup/shutdown options

Look just like the original

Now you can select how to geotag your images, with GPS position and/or textual location

Capture timer

And last, image effects.

Great work! And thanks to the whole CSSU team for their awesome work.

gdspeak, a D-Bus espeak service

I've been planning on doing this for a while now (a year or so, sigh), a simple and easy to use D-Bus service for speech output, using espeak.

What it does is queue text with a simple priority system, with just a few simple D-Bus calls. There are two interfaces, on fire-and-forget and one that can be used for tracking the output so calling applications know when it's speech has been output. It will also send signals for spoken words and such. Language and voice settings can be changed.
Currently LC_MESSAGES is used to set the default voice, but a proper control panel applet is planned.

It is still work-in-progress but works mostly. My current problem is that when using pulseaudio output espeak won't report any events. Testing version is available in extras-devel, but not recommended yet for any serious use.

•  Git repo here
•  Not uptodate documentation here

TODO:

•  Fix the event reporting
•  Make control panel applet

N900 RSS reader hacking, part 2

Making some progress, now with pannable feed list, pannable folder management (that broke the folder management, sigh) and more finger friendly text entries. First try at stopping the annoying connection dialog spamming didn't work, I must have missed something somewhere. No surprise there, the code is a mess.

Testing packages available at http://ftp.tal.org/pub/maemo/testing/fremantle/ you need both osso-rss-feed-reader-lib and osso-rss-feed-reader debs.

Finger friendly text entries

Pannable feed list

N900 RSS reader hacking, part 1

I'm pretty happy with the RSS reader in the N900 (and 770+N8x0), it works pretty much ok and does what it's supposed to do. But Nokia didn't do a very good work in porting it over from the old tablets. A lot of non-fingerfriendlyness, no portrait mode, and does not really follow the windowing method used by for example the e-mail app.
I've been thinking about doing something about it for a while now and the CSSU work inspired me to take a look at it.

First was to get rotation and portrait mode working, that was pretty easy, pretty much a copy&paste job from my rotation code in Mapper.When rotated it hides useless functionality from the toolbar.

Next up is fixing the layout in portrait mode, as currently it sucks, as you can see below:

Maemo CSSU in images

Fortunately for the N900 the maemo community is very much alive still. And now with some proper updates to the system itself with Community Seamless Software Update or CSSU. Main focus has been on enabling much requested features (portrait mode) and bug fixes. The textual changelog is a bit dry and searching the forum is a pain, imho.
So below you can find some of the new features of the CSSU in pictures. Enjoy!

Portrait USB connection dialog

Application manager is patched to support portrait mode properly.

Portrait mode Application Manager

Settings now supports portrait mode. Two appplets, osso-applet-notificationlight and osso-applet-display have been replaced with FOSS clones. And a new applet for displaying credits for the CSSU has now also been added. The reason for not changing the system version that is displayed in the "About product" dialog is to keep the system compatible with Ovi requirements.

Settings now supports portrait mode

Rewrite of Display applet, in portrait mode

Rewrite of notification light applet, in portrait mode

New CSSU about dialog

Application list supports portrait mode too

System main menu works in portrait mode

Wine extras building progress

Got the wine package building on extras as you might have noticed. Next is to tidy up the package a bit and make it semi usable.Adding a winemine desktop entry that is :)
Not much else that you can do currently with wine on arm, unless someone likes to port some windows apps.

Wine 1.3.8 debs

I've tried uploading Wine to extras now a couple of times, but the build crashes with some cryptic debhelper error that does not happen on my own scratchbox so it's a bit hard to debug. And it takes ages to build wine so debugging this is not funny at all.

Anyway, download wine 1.3.8 maemo packages here.

Anyone know how to get around this?

dpkg-shlibdeps: error: couldn't find library libwine.so.1 needed by debian/wine/opt/wine/lib/wine/notepad.exe.so (ELF format: 'elf32-littlearm'; RPATH: '').
Note: libraries are not searched in other binary packages that do not have any shlibs or symbols file.
To help dpkg-shlibdeps find private libraries, you might need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
dh_shlibdeps: dpkg-shlibdeps -Tdebian/wine.substvars debian/wine/opt/wine/lib/wine
... MANY DLL FILES ...
/bin/winegcc debian/wine/opt/wine/bin/wrc returned exit code 2
make: *** [binary-predeb-IMPL/wine] Error 9
dpkg-buildpackage: error: fakeroot debian/rules binary gave error exit status 2

abook-qrcode 0.4

Uploaded a new version (0.4) of abook-qrcode to extras-devel. Plenty of new exciting features! :)

Now instead of saving the QR Code directly, you will get a nice preview QR Code image that someone can read directly from the phone screen. From the menu you have the option to Save or Share. Share uses the N900 sharing service so you can send the QR Code as an e-mail, using bluetooth or any configured sharing service like Facebook or Ovi.

New release of QR Code contact export plugin (abook-qrcode)

abook-qrcode is an address book extension, for the N900, to export your contacts as vcards encoded in a QR Code image.
I uploaded a new release, version 0.3 of abook-qrcode and it is now in extras-testing for you testing pleasure. New in this version:

• Selection of location and filename of exported QR Code image
• Export enabled in "My information" too

Planned for the next version is the ability to import contacts from any image containing a QR Code.

Wasting time ranting and not doing it

This is just silly, the time used to rant about how hard it is could have been spent making the .deb. It is not that hard to create and you can always use another source deb as a template. There are plenty to choose from.

Wine 1.3.4 on arm (N900)

After reading the announcement of wine 1.3.4 and particularly this on winehq: "Winelib now supports the ARM platform" I just had to try it.

Builds fine in sbox, no problems there. Initial run takes a while of clicking on cancel as winedbg crashes but after that the built in programs runs, but the window manager is not doing such a great job with the wine windows and dialogs.

Screenshots of winemine below:

Update 15.10.2010:
Using desktop mode makes using wine much nicer and keyboard input works too. Running winecfg is a bit problematic as it won't fit the screen properly but editing ~/.wine/user.reg and adding the following lines in the end enables desktop mode:

[Software\\Wine\\Explorer] 1287126526
"Desktop"="Default"

[Software\\Wine\\Explorer\\Desktops] 1287126530
"Default"="800x480"

GPS information widgets

I've been busy with splitting out and rewriting the GPS information widgets from Mapper. I've also removed all the gdk rendering code and using cairo only.
Below is a screenshot from testing app:

The problem with maemo (and meego in a way too)

I've been a happy user of both the original Nokia 770 tablet, the N810 and N900. From the point of view of a normal user I've been very happy with all of them, they have done what they promised and as a user I don't have that much to complain about. But..

As a developer I was drawn to the original tables as it was gobject/gtk+/gnome based with no bloat of C++ or some java stuff.
Made it easy to create software and somewhat easy to support both desktop and tablets in the same software, with some ifdeffing for maemo specific parts (gtk/hildon). That was more or less working in 2007-2008, but currently it's a blody mess.
Trying to support Gregale, Diablo, Fremantle and normal desktop gnome in the same app is these days such a pain that I've almost lost interest to do anything at all (one reason for Mapper developing at a snail pace currently).
Even Fremantle, that should use the latest technologies, (and Diablo) is stuck in the stone ages, gtk is in the 2.10 series (3-4 yeras old) Gregale is even worse with 2.6. Same with glib. Then we have gnome-vfs and gio mess.
And tablets specific Hildon changes, 3 almost compatible versions. Then we have 3-4 different UI styles to support.

And now upstream gtk+ is moving to version 3.0 and GNOME applications should move over to it. GConf is going to be deprecated with GSetting/dconf.

Now what the fuck are you supposed to do as developer wanting to support all tablets and desktop in the same app?

How to change hildon context menu content depending on context

Mainly as a reminder to myself, but if you need to change the content of a context menu set with gtk_widget_tap_and_hold_setup() connect the "show" signal and do you show/hide in the signal handler.

Create your menu, connect signal and setup tap-and-hold:

menu=GTK_MENU(hildon_gtk_menu_new());
g_signal_connect(G_OBJECT (menu), "show", G_CALLBACK(menu_items_visibility_cb), NULL);
gtk_widget_tap_and_hold_setup(widget, menu, NULL, 0);

Then in your handler, check what you need and hide/show menu items:

static void
menu_items_visibility_cb(GtkWidget *menu, gpointer data)
{
if (foo) gtk_widget_show(menu_item_foo); else gtk_widget_hide(menu_item_foo);
}

Mapper 1.0.6.7 released

Available now in extras-devel for both Diablo and Fremantle. Below some recent screenshots.
More information about Mapper can be found at its home page.

mod-support video

Below a short video demonstrating mod-support:

Hemsedal Panorama Wallpaper for the N900

I'm going to Hemsedal, (in Norway) next week with the Hupellus gang and I was checking out some of my pictures from the last trip in 2008 and I found out I had taken a nice panorama.

So I created a nice N900 wallpaper was made from it, you can find it in extras-devel now (and soon in testing too).

Easy wallpaper slicing for N900

First, create a 3200x480 png file (For 4 desktops), and using ImageMagick slice it up:

convert wp.png -quiet -crop 800x wp_%d.png

Or you can use this template makefile when your working on your wallpaper:

BASEIMAGE=wp

all: $(BASEIMAGE)_0.png

$(BASEIMAGE)_0.png: $(BASEIMAGE).png
 convert $(BASEIMAGE).png -quiet -crop 800x  $(BASEIMAGE)_%d.png

Mainframe in your pocket

I just uploaded hercules, an S/390 emulator, to extras-devel. Now you can enjoy your favorite mainframe operating system on your N900, N810 and N800, be it an original mainframe OS or Linux.

Below an screen shot of Slack/390 install disk booting up.